Statistics and Sociology

Index

The group of East-European states—Russia, Austria, Turkey (which geographically should now be considered among the Asian slates, and economically a “semi-colony”), and the six small Balkan states—Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Albania—clearly reveal a fundamentally different picture. Not a single nationally fully homogeneous state! Only the small Balkan countries can he described as national states, though we should not forget that here, too, other nationalities comprise from 5 to 10 per cent, that very great numbers (compared with the total number of people belonging to the given nation) of Rumanians and Serbs live outside their “own” states, and that, in general, the bourgeois-national development of Balkan statehood was not completed even by “yesterday’s” wars of 1911–12. There is not a single national state like Spain, Sweden, etc., among the small Balkan countries. And in the big East European states, in all three, the proportion of their “own”, principal nationality is only 43 per cent. More than half the population of each of these three big states, 57 per cent, is made up of other nationalities (or, to use the official Russian term, of “aliens”). Statistically, the difference between the West-European and East-European groups of states can be expressed as follows:

In the first group we have ten homogeneous or near homogeneous national states with an aggregate population of 231 million. There are only two heterogeneous states, but without national oppression and with constitutional and factual equality; their population is 11.5 million.

In the second group 6 states, with a population of 23 million, are nearly homogeneous; three states, with a population of 249 million, are heterogeneous or “mixed” and without national equality.

On the whole, the proportion of the foreign-nationality population (i.e., not belonging to the principal nation[1] of the given state) is 6 per cent in Western Europe, and 7 per cent if we add the United States and Japan. In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, the proportion is 53 percent![2]